When dis­cussing a musi­cian like Fela Kuti, many of our usu­al terms fail us. They fail us, that is, if we came of age in a musi­cal cul­ture in which artists and bands put out an album of ten or so lyrics-for­ward songs every two or three years, pro­mot­ing it on tour while also play­ing their biggest hits. Fela — as all his fans refer to him — could put out six or sev­en albums in a sin­gle year, and refused to play live any mate­r­i­al he’d already record­ed. Even the word song, as we know it, does­n’t quite reflect the nature of his com­po­si­tions, which got expan­sive enough that two or three of them (or just one, half of it on each side) could fill a long-play­ing record.

Wal­ter Ben­jamin said of great lit­er­ary works that they either dis­solve a genre or invent one, and Fela’s musi­cal works invent­ed the genre of Afrobeat. The sound of that genre, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the Poly­phon­ic video above, reflects the dis­tinc­tive for­ma­tion of Fela him­self, who was born and raised in Nige­ria, stud­ied at the Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music in Lon­don, and came of age dur­ing the end of Africa’s era of decol­o­niza­tion. To a lis­ten­er reared on Anglo-Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music, his sig­na­ture mix­ture of West African rhythms with jazz and funk tex­tures sounds famil­iar enough — at least for the first ten or fif­teen min­utes, after which time the lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence ascends to a dif­fer­ent state entire­ly.

Some­times it takes Fela just about that long to start singing, and when he does, he’s giv­en to procla­ma­tions, chants, calls-and-respons­es, and polit­i­cal exhor­ta­tions deliv­ered in the kind of Eng­lish that sounds high­ly unfa­mil­iar to non-African lis­ten­ers. Not that it’s always alien­at­ing: indeed, this par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of words and music has cap­ti­vat­ed gen­er­a­tions of lis­ten­ers from far out­side its place of ori­gin. One of them is David Byrne, who used Talk­ing Heads’ Remain in Light as more or less a medi­um for chan­nel­ing the musi­cal spir­it of Fela. Not that he him­self was gone yet: indeed, he had almost two decades of his event­ful life to go, one you can learn much more about from Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, a twelve-part bio­graph­i­cal pod­cast by Jad Abum­rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Brought into Fela’s world by a fam­i­ly con­nec­tion, that for­mer Radi­o­lab host con­duct­ed dozens and dozens of inter­views on the rela­tion­ship between the man, his music, and the polit­i­cal con­text in which he found him­self. The facts, as any Fela fan knows, don’t always align com­fort­ably with main­stream sen­si­bil­i­ties of the twen­ty-twen­ties — the charges range from essen­tial­ism to polygamy — but as Lefevre reminds us, an artist should be inter­pret­ed through the lens of his own cul­ture and his­to­ry. How­ev­er many of us con­sid­er him a “prob­lem­at­ic fave” today, Fela Kuti will always be the man who invent­ed Afrobeat — and since nobody else has quite man­aged to repli­cate his grooves in their simul­ta­ne­ous tight­ness and loose­ness, blunt­ness and sub­tle­ty, per­haps also the man who dis­solved it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

When Afrobeat Leg­end Fela Kuti Col­lab­o­rat­ed with Cream Drum­mer Gin­ger Bak­er

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

Watch the Talk­ing Heads Play Mate­r­i­al From Their Ground­break­ing Album Remain in Light in an Incred­i­ble Con­cert from 1980

The Awe-Inspir­ing But Trag­ic Sto­ry of Africa’s Fes­ti­val In The Desert (2001–2012)

Stream 8,000 Vin­tage Afropop Record­ings Dig­i­tized & Made Avail­able by The British Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.